He said students found the grenades while playing near a central school at Gaurnagar. They informed their elders, who immediately alerted the police, who rushed to the area and recovered the grenades after digging up the soil.

Local villagers said that the grenades might have been buried during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 when the sovereign country emerged.

Historian Bikach Chowdhury said Tripura had six to seven camps in four sectors from where the Bangladeshi ‘Mukti Joddhas’ (freedom fighters) fought Pakistani forces after being trained in Tripura.

“Over 1,600,000 Bangladeshis — a number larger than the state’s then total population of 1,500,000 — had taken shelter in Tripura alone,” he said.

The nine-month-long “Mukti Juddho” (Liberation War) later turned into a full-scale India-Pakistan War, leading to the surrender of nearly 93,000 Pakistani soldiers in Dhaka on December 16, 1971.